In a recent post  I described what I mean by "real" and "green" - things like real food, real relationships, real connections to nature and to our own deep values, and living regeneratively or at least in ways that do less harm.

I think there are (at least) three particular challenges that make "a real green life" something we have to put awareness and effort into building and claiming for ourselves.  In this post I'll describe these three challenges, and then I'll borrow from the Permaculture Principle "the problem is the solution" to turn them inside out and unpack three useful keys from within them. 

Challenge #1: Our culture discourages us from thinking for ourselves

To a very large degree we’ve become “institutionalized” by experts and social institutions who wait at our elbows to provide for us, think for us, and rescue us from our mistakes -- which erodes our capacity to think for ourselves, take appropriate risks, and claim responsibility for our own lives.

In addition, global corporations invest tremendous resources to influence our thinking for two very specific outcomes:

• to create a sense of lack and inadequacy, a hunger for "more," in our lives, and
• to direct our focus towards the gadgets, gizmos, and entertainment that they imply will fill the void.

The technology used to direct our thinking in this way is extremely sophisticated, and the budgets allocated to it are enormous. Unless we make a conscious effort to screen out the constant stream of suggestions (most of which goes on below our conscious awareness when we expose ourselves to the channels it uses), our minds are no longer our own.

Challenge #2: Our culture doesn't support us in taking care of ourselves

The second of our 3 challenges relates to the "institutionalized" thing I mentioned above: we've become conditioned to rely on others to provide for us.

We've lost the practical skills of self-reliance and community interdependence that sustained us before experts, institutes, corporations, supermarkets and superstores took over providing for our needs.

It's far easier for most of us to pay an expert or go shopping, than it is to ask a neighbor for help, take the time to figure it out for ourselves, bruise our knuckles, go hungry once in a while, make mistakes, learn from them, try again, make more mistakes... 

Food and medicine which once came from the living world around us via the ingenuity and hard work of self, family, and friends, now come from supermarkets and pharmacies -- which disconnect you from your local community and ecosystem and turn you into a consumer in a vast globalized system of industrial extraction and manufacturing.

Which leads me to challenge #3...

Challenge #3: Our culture doesn't encourage us to connect

Our authentic connections to our inner selves, each other, and our natural world are rapidly being superseded by a fake, virtual reality and digital social media.

Our reliance on (and therefore connection to) each other and the natural world around us is being (or has been) replaced by supermarkets and superstores.

The more we rely on these fake, hollow substitutes, the more disconnected we become AND, the hungrier we get for the real thing that's now missing from our lives. Which leads us into addictive behavior, seeking another fix, and another fix, that never satisfies the underlying need.

Our third challenge is that our connections to each other, to any strong internal sense of meaning or purpose, and to the natural world, are under sustained attack.

We've forgotten how to live in community, how to rely on ourselves and each other, how to anchor our every day lives in the sacred, how to align with nature's rhythms, and how to recognize and connect with our own deepest needs and values. 

Turning the problem into the solution 

Can you see where I'm going with all this? Turned inside out, each of these three challenges obviously holds it's own solution.

1. Thinking For Ourselves

As Einstein said, we can't expect to solve our problems with the same thinking that created them. Challenge #1 was that our culture discourages us from thinking for ourselves, and the first key to a real green life is that we need to take responsibility for our own thinking.

I'm not just talking here about the ruminations that go on in our heads. I'm referring to the entirety of our inner lives -- because how we conduct our inner lives and care for our inner selves shapes the way we show up for the world outside ourselves.

The Thinking For Ourselves essays on A Real Green Life explore ideas for examining our assumptions about our selves and our purpose in the world, reclaiming our sovereignty as individuals, and building our capacity to care more effectively for everything that's important to us, including our inner selves.

2. Caring for ourselves

Challenge #2 was that our culture doesn't support us in taking care of ourselves, and the antidote is obvious. The second key to a real green life is caring for ourselves and each other in ways that minimize harm and prioritize well-being and regeneration.

That doesn't have to mean we have to do it ALL. Trying to do that would be disastrous for most of us. We're after community sufficiency, not self-sufficiency, and "community" can mean many different things. 

For what we can't or don't want to do, we can look for ways to trade with others near us, and to support local, ethical craftspeople and small businesses.

And there is a lot we can do ourselves. The Caring For Ourselves content on A Real Green Life delves into things like growing some of our own food and taking back our basic healthcare, both of which will get easier the more we engage with them in small, manageable ways.

3. Reconnecting

Challenge #3 was that our culture discourages us from connecting authentically to our selves, each other, and nature. The third key is simple to state: we need to re-connect. 

Which might be simpler than you think, because actually everything is already connected.

The trouble starts when we lose track of our connections, when we forget that we are both held by, and also  responsible to, the web of life that sustains us.

As social activist Grace Lee Boggs said, "It's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections."¹

You'll find the theme "everything is connected" running through a lot of my writing one way or another. I also explore the whole topic more directly in "Reconnecting," which is a sub-category under " Thinking For Ourselves."

Related posts

This post follows on from "What I Mean by a Real Green Life."

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This post is about how our social routines and our physical environments shape our grocery shopping habits and nudge us in our buying decisions. Once you see these influences at work in your life, you'll be able to respond to them in more deliberate ways rather than just being prompted by them without realizing it.

This is Strategy #5 in a series of strategies for reducing our reliance on the globalized industrial food system. If you haven't read the previous two posts in this series please do that first, then come back to this one. The previous posts are:

1. "3 Supermarket Strategies to Help You Spend Less, Tread Lighter, and Live Better"
2. "Strategy #4: to Help Parents Spend Less at the Supermarket"

Who is in charge of your grocery shopping habits?

We think we're running our lives with rational thinking, logic, and will power. But studies show that in actual fact our environment has much more influence on our behavior than we realize. (I wrote about how our environment can distract us from our goals or guide us toward them, here.)

We'll start this post with some examples of how our physical and social environments shape our habits. Then we'll look at how the environment inside the supermarket is designed to prompt us to buy more, and I'll share a specific example of how a family routine was prompting me to go shopping more often than I needed to.

Finally, I'll give you some suggestions for how you can make use of all of this and become more aware and deliberate about your shopping choices.

How our environments shape us

For a very obvious example of how our social environment can support or hinder us in making changes to our behavior, think about a habit like smoking. If you were a smoker who wanted to stop, it would be essential to put yourself in environments where no-one else smokes. Hanging around with smokers would make it extremely difficult to break the habit and sustain the change for the long term. 

Our physical environment shapes us too, literally as well as figuratively. For example if you took all the raised seating out of your living area and replaced it with a mat and cushions on the floor, you'd gradually adjust to sitting on the floor with associated changes in posture, flexibility, and mobility over time.

James Clear, author on habits and behavior change, calls this “choice architecture,” and says it’s “the number one driver of better habits.” (He should know; he wrote a New York Times best seller on the topic of how to change our behavior.)

Marketers know all about how our environments influence our behaviors, and they make full use of it. In the next section, I'll show you how the environment inside a supermarket is specifically designed to prompt you to buy more than you had planned to when you walked in there.

How "a few things" becomes a trolley-load

Everything about the way supermarkets are laid out and the ways the shelves are packed is designed to prompt you to buy: 

• the size of the shopping trolley (research shows that you buy more if your trolley looks empty)
• delicious bakery smells wafting over you as enter, to whet your appetite for all the foods you're about to be choosing
  
• fresh fruit and veg near the entrance to give an impression of healthful freshness that lingers for the rest of your visit and to give you the feeling that you've already selected healthy stuff, so further along it's ok to indulge in a few extra "treats"
  
• placement of specific items at eye height for you and your kids 
• the placement of items on hooks that protrude out a little from the shelves and are a different, but related, category to the other items in that aisle 
• stacks of snack foods at the ends of the aisles - high traffic areas that you can't avoid passing by
• and of course, at the check out, the magazines for you to help yourself to as you wait in line to pay, and the sugar snacks for you to pick up since you're now hungry and light headed from all the stimuli you've just been subjected to

If I were a supermarket manager, perhaps I'd make similar decisions. I hope I wouldn't, but then I'd probably go broke or get sacked. I'm glad I'm not a supermarket manager. 

***

The next section is an example of how our weekly family routine was putting me in close proximity to the supermarket which was prompting me to go shopping twice as often as I needed to, and what I did about it. 

How a good book is helping me take care of my grocery shopping habits

This example showed up in my Supermarket Notebook a while ago. (I introduced the idea of keeping a Supermarket Notebook in Strategy #1.)

First, some context: we live in a rural area and we’re home educators. Our daughter does dance lessons every Tuesday afternoon during school term, which is a reason for a weekly town trip. During school holidays, there’s no dance class so there's no regular weekly requirement to go to town.

Now, to the point of the story: a while ago, I realized that during school holidays we only go shopping about once every two to three weeks. But, during school term we seem to need to go shopping once a week. On dance class day. Now isn't that interesting?

Being in town on dance class day, in close proximity to the supermarket, was prompting me to “just go in and get a few things.” And then before you know it, "a few things" turns into a trolley-load. Which, as we discussed in the previous section, isn't by coincidence.

Now, I go shopping every second week, at the most, all year round. But how did I break the habit of weekly shopping during school term?

Every second week when I drive my daughter to dance class, I take a good book. I park outside dance, let my daughter out, then lean the seat back and take out my book. (Ahhhhh... I LOVE a good book. And as I said in this post, reading is a great way to immerse yourself in something that makes you feel good.)

So there I stay, reading my book rather than marinating in marketing messages, until it's time to drive home. I save on fuel and grocery costs and I get to relax for an hour and a half that I would otherwise have spent running around shopping. 

Necessity is the mother of invention

This strategy helps me re-affirm to myself and my family that we don't need the grocery store every week. Our efforts at growing some of our own food, making our own bathroom and cleaning products, and generally being as frugal as we can, are all paying off.

But what if it doesn't work? What if you get near the end of the "non-shopping week" and realize you forgot to stock up enough on this or that, and now it isn't going to last until the next shopping trip?

Necessity is the mother of invention. By putting yourself in this predicament you have actually set up your environment--specifically that empty spot on the bathroom or pantry shelf or in the fridge--to prompt you to be more resourceful than you otherwise would have to be.

The consumer economy wants you to be reliant on shopping frequently. But you don't have to be. You can train yourself, gradually, to be less and less reliant on the quick and easy fixes that are dangled in front of us like peanuts for monkeys.

Take action

Understanding why supermarkets are set up the way they are enables us to avoid falling for the trickery quite so easily. And seeing how our behaviors are linked together in our routines enables us to tweak our routines to support the kinds of behavior change we want in our lives. 

Here are some suggestions for ways to use your Supermarket Notebook (from the first post in this series) to figure out how you're currently being influenced and decide what you want to change about that. 

1. Think about what prompts you to go grocery shopping as often as you do. Are there things in your physical environment, your family routines or your social routines that make it easy or logical for you to go on certain days? Do you really need to go that often? Could you consolidate your trips so that you go less often, shop more efficiently, and build your "resourcefulness muscles" between grocery shopping trips?
   
2.  Think about how your buying decisions are being influenced once you get into the supermarket. Go through the list above, of ways that the supermarket environment is set up to influence your choices. Which ones have you been falling for? Remember, they're subtle. They're designed to work without you being aware of them. What can you do to make yourself impervious to them? (There are tips in Strategy #3 and Strategy #4 that might help.)
3. Scribble the answers to all these questions on the Notes Pages in your Supermarket Notebook. You haven't tried to change anything yet. Just begin by getting it all out on those pages so you can see what's really going on. Gradually (give it time) you'll see ways you might be able to make changes. Write those ideas down as they come to you. 
4. Try one idea at a time (remember Strategy #2, take it in small steps) and write down the outcomes so you'll have a record of what you've tried, what helped you spend less or shop smarter, what didn't, and what you learned in the process. 

An important tip is that useful, actionable answers may not come right away to the questions you ask in your notebook. Be patient. Ask again next week, and the week after, until gradually the answers and insights start to flow. Give yourself time to find ways to make positive changes to your routines and habits that will really stick. 

References and resources

Here are two short videos, (each a little over 2 minutes) and a short read (less than 2 minutes) about how supermarkets are designed, from a consumer advocacy website called FoolProofMe.org, who suggest that we "make healthy skepticism a habit" in this commercialized world.

Are You Being Super-Marketed at the Grocery Store? - video

The Untold Truth About Grocery Stores! - video

The Low-down on Super-Marketing - short post

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In a recent post, “3 Strategies to help you spend less at the Supermarket,” I said I believe we can gradually re-build food sovereignty in our local communities by making tiny shifts in our thinking, values, and habits.

These are shifts that help us move away from the supermarket giants towards healthier, more ethical, and still affordable ways of sourcing our needs. I see them as very effective because they address several needs at once:

Furthermore, we're addressing these needs while doing something we'd be doing anyway: feeding our families. 

Envisioning the food system we want

Many people have already made big shifts. For example, one reader who commented on the last post has drastically cut her supermarket reliance by shopping at the local co-op and using a local milk man and green grocer.

That’s an inspiring picture for us to hold in our minds. Imagine if, in every neighborhood, you could trade eggs for excess greens with a neighbor, receive your milk from a farmer you know by name, and shop for your other needs at a local co-op, knowing that your dollar helps keep it thriving².

Lots of neighborhoods don’t yet have access to food systems like this. How do we build them?

I don’t have a quick and easy answer, unfortunately. But I do feel sure that if we just do what we can to put one foot in front of the other toward more localized and ethical food systems, things will shift. It's not possible or necessary to have this all sorted out by lunchtime tomorrow.

Just to be on the look out for what steps you can take and to take them when you can, is enough. 

So, with that vision of healthy food systems in mind, here is another strategy to help you on your journey of small steps away from industrial food and toward healthy, ethical food. This strategy is especially for parents.

(Please, if you haven't read the previous post with the first 3 strategies, do that first. Then come back to this post.)

Strategy #4: Set yourself and your child/ren up for success before you leave home

What could you do before you leave home, to set yourself and your children up for success at the supermarket? Your exact answer will be unique to you and your children, of course, but here are some ideas and suggestions to get you started.

Scribble one or more of these down in your Supermarket Notebook (from Strategy #1) and make it happen next time you go shopping.

Eat before you shop

If you can, eat a decent meal before you go shopping. At least have a snack that wont spike your blood sugar and then leave you feeling hungry an hour later. The reason for this is that the last thing you want to be feeling as you push that trolley along the aisles is hunger or light-headedness. Hunger triggers buying decisions we otherwise wouldn't make.

Feed the kids too! And/or consider having healthy snacks for them in your handbag that you can reach for if you need to. If your child has a snack to much on, especially an interesting one that they don’t get very often, they’ll be less interested in snatching things off the shelves.

When my kids were little, one of the first items I would buy at the supermarket was a small packet of soft cheese for them to much on as they sat in the trolley. I would keep the empty packet, and pay for it at the check out counter along with everything else. It was a special treat that the kids loved, it kept them occupied, and it didn't spike their blood sugar or excite them.

Supermarket-only toys

Consider keeping a  supermarket-only toy ready for your small child/ren that’s just for playing with while they’re sitting in the shopping trolley. It’s difficult to compete with the novelty and glitz that a small child sees in a supermarket, but a toy that’s just for her, that she never sees any other time, will help a bit.

(One word of caution: I never used screens as toys or distractions for my kids. Now that they’re older they use the computer to research things they are interested in and to do creative work, but they have never used screens for gaming or socializing. In fact, the creators of digital products expressly say that they don’t allow their own kids to play with them -- which should be instructive for the rest of us!³)

Enlist the kids' help instead of fighting with them

Have a plan for how your older child is going to help with the shopping rather than hinder it. If the child is old enough, consider giving him his very own short list of items that he is responsible for noticing and putting in the trolley. The list can grow as his capacity grows.

A child who feels that their contributions are valued will be much more cooperative than one who is constantly hearing, “No! Don’t touch that! Put that back!”

Be clear

Be clear with your kids before you leave home about why you’re going to the supermarket.

(Hint: it’s not to spend your heard-earned money on spur-of-the-moment purchases and strange substances masquerading as food, to line the pockets of wealthy executives at the expense of your health and well-being.)

Consider having a short family meeting, perhaps during a meal the day before you go shopping, where you assert some variation of: “Here’s what is on our list. We are only going to buy anything that is not on our list if it meets such and such criteria.” An example of the criteria might be: it’s a real food or a needed product that is on special and has a good use-by date.

Your kids won't remember the details the first few times you do this, but it will be clear to them that you have a plan. And s/he who has a plan invariably gets to lead the way.

Building self-directed lives

Even very young children will gradually take all of this on board. You’ll be shaping their supermarket expectations ahead of time, which reduces disappointments and friction.

You’ll also be teaching them something incredibly valuable: how to hold to a meaningful course of action rather than be swayed by the noise and distractions that are aimed at parting us with our our money and our ability to lead a self-directed life that respects other lives on Earth.

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I intend for our grandchildren to grow up connected to their food supply and liberated from the consumer economy. When they learn about the destructive mono-cultures and global-corporate supply chains that supplied the supermarkets we relied on, they’ll wonder what we were thinking. 

Not to mention what they might wonder when they hear about the toilet paper debacle.

I've been thinking a lot about what we can do to make it easier on ourselves to begin (or continue) to gradually replace the weekly supermarket shopping trip with something healthier. Here's some of what I've come up with so far. 

Basic principles and broad strategies

We know that most of the stuff on supermarket shelves is not great for our health, and that it’s terrible for the health of ecosystems, farming communities, and local economies.

On top of that, we can see food prices rising as packets and bottles get smaller (or their contents do). And then there’s the skyrocketing cost of the fuel required for driving to the supermarket.

Whether we view it in terms of health, ethics, or affordability, it's making less and less sense to drive to the supermarket frequently.

But how can we find the time and develop the resources we need to become independent of the supermarket? How will we replace our weekly supermarket trip with affordable, local, healthy, ethical ways of sourcing our needs? What would that even look like, and what are the steps to get there?

Without sitting down and discussing your personal circumstances, I can't suggest how you should embark on this journey or which ways to go. But there are some basic principles we can apply to the process of figuring this out. I’ve been thinking about them (a lot, for a long time) and I’ve come up with some broad strategies that might be helpful. 

The first is to know where you're at right now, and to do that you're going to need a way of keeping track of your supermarket-related habits.

Strategy #1: Create a "Supermarket Notebook" 

Before you can make a map, you have to get to know the terrain. You have to figure out where you're at right now and what the habits and tendencies are that have put you there.

Get a dedicated note book and label it your "Supermarket Notebook." Then you can keep your shopping lists instead of throwing them away after each shopping trip (or not having a list at all), and you can gradually build up a record of your buying habits. Date each list, and scribble at the bottom what you spent. Or staple the receipt to the page. 

Keep the next page blank, for notes. That way, as you're writing your shopping list or when you get home and you're stapling your receipt in, you'll have space to scribble down a few notes about whatever comes to mind that might be relevant.

You could also turn to the last page/s of the note book and put down a few notes about how  you’d like this journey to look, why its important to you, and/or where you’d like it to take you to.

Personally, being a bit of a nerd, I keep supermarket note book and a spreadsheet on the computer. 

The spreadsheet has columns like “fruit and veg,” “cold section,” “packaged/processed,” “bathroom,” “laundry,” etc. I have one I created years ago with what things I regularly bought in each column before I started this journey. And I have more recent versions that I fill in from time to time so I can see my progress.

When I feel despondent about how much I still rely on the supermarket, it's encouraging to be able to look back and see how far we've actually come. 

Strategy #2: Keep the steps small

It’s important to be kind to yourself in this process.

Ditching the supermarket is a bit like trying to eat a whole elephant: the only way to do it is one bite at a time. You only need one criteria for how to tackle it: KEEP THE BITES SMALL. You'll never get your elephant eaten if you choke yourself on the first few bites. When we want the changes we're making to actually stick, bigger or faster is definitely not better. 

As you build the habit of keeping your “supermarket notebook” up to date, you’ll already have achieved something that’s worth a small celebration: bringing more mindfulness and awareness to your shopping habits and needs. How will you celebrate this first, important step?

As you live your life, go shopping, and take notes, be on the look out for small improvements that suggest themselves to you as you scribble and scan your notes.

If you see two you could implement this week, I suggest you restrain yourself. Use just one of them, pat yourself on the back, and save the second one for next week. 

You never know, you might even build up a backlog of delicious ideas you can look forward to trying out

As you make each small change, note them down on your "notes pages."  This way you'll have a “breadcrumb trail” to come back to if (when) you temporarily fall of the wagon and revert back to where you started.

Strategy #3: Get Clear on What You Really Need

Ask questions. Question everything, because there's always something to learn. 

In the context of writing your shopping list and shopping at the supermarket, I have two kinds of questions for you to ask about the products you’re considering.:

1. questions about whether you really need an item 
2. questions about who is influencing your thinking about this item

Lets take a look at both of these types of questions as they relate to your supermarket shopping habits.

Questions about whether you really need something

Ask yourself, “Do I/we really need this? What would happen if I didn’t buy this?”

If the answer is “Yes, I really need this,” then go ahead. Put it on the list, put it in the trolley, and move on.
(As time goes by your concepts of what you really need might change, but there’s no hurry. Remember: be kind to yourself!)

But maybe the answer that comes up might be more like, “After a year of not buying this I would have saved a small fortune and kept a small mountain of trash out of landfill.”

If that kind of answer comes up, you know what to do. Leave  it off the list, and leave it on the shelf.

Questions about who’s influencing your thinking

Items on supermarket shelves that our grandparents never heard of or imagined have become “necessities” today because of shared ideas that nobody is questioning. 

Now I have a surprise for you (not). Most of those shared ideas, if not all of them, were planted in the public psyche over the last 100+ years by clever, manipulative marketing. 

Who runs the marketing campaigns? Profit-focused corporations. Not health-focused. Not ethics-focused. Profit-focused. 

Are you surprised? Me neither. Ask yourself, “Who says I need this thing in my life? My mother? People on my Facebook feed?  Someone who will profit from my purchase?”

We love our mothers. We love our friends and family on Facebook or where-ever we interact with them (hopefully that’s in person at least some of the time). But loving them doesn’t mean we have to shop like they do or live like they do.

And as for the profit-focused corporations funding the advertising campaigns that generate that sense of inadequacy and lack and the need to keep up with the Jones’s… well as far as I’m concerned, they can go jump in a lake.

So those were the first three strategies I came up with when I asked myself, “how could we make it easier to begin (or continue) to de-throne the supermarket and its destructive supply chain and replace it with something healthier?”

I hope you've found this helpful or thought-provoking, and I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions to help my thinking along!

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